NASA Bioscience Advisory Committee

A committee appointed in July 1959 to provide recommendations
on NASA's future direction in the life sciences.
It reported in January 1960 that NASA's involvement should include not only
space medicine in support of manned spaceflight
but also "investigations of the effects of extraterrestrial environments
on living organisms including the search for extraterrestrial life." In
the spring of 1960, the NASA Office of Life
Sciences came into existence, and by August NASA had authorized the
Jet Propulsion Laboratory to investigate the
type of spacecraft needed to land on Mars and
search for life. To study the chemical evolution of life and related issues,
a life sciences laboratory was set up at the NASA
Ames Research Center.